Shift Technology, a startup that helps insurance companies detect and prevent fraud, announced Thursday it closed on a $220 million Series D led by Advent International, via Advent Tech. This brings the company’s total valuation to more than $1 billion, making it Boston’s latest tech unicorn.
Founded in Paris in 2014, Shift made Boston its U.S. headquarters back in 2018, citing the major “fraud challenge” in America. For years, the company was best known for its AI-based fraud detection and claims automation software. Then, this year it rolled out its Shift Insurance Suite, which is designed to help insurers automate and optimize a wider array of processes across the policy lifecycle, including underwriting, subrogation and compliance.
Today, Shift has more than 100 customers in 25 different countries, and says it has analyzed nearly 2 billion claims to date.
“Shift has made a name for itself in the complex world of insurance,” Thomas Weisman, Advent’s director of technology investments in London, said in a statement. “Shift’s advanced suite of SaaS products is helping insurers to reshape manual and often time-consuming claims processes in a safer and more automated way. We are proud to be part of this exciting company’s next wave of growth.”
The company says it plans to use this fresh funding to continue ushering in the “digital transformation” of the global insurance industry. In practice, this means increasing its R&D efforts and expanding its presence in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Shift says it is also expanding its services into the property and casualty insurance market as well as the health insurance sector — an area the company says poses a “large opportunity.”
“The entire Shift team has worked tirelessly to build this company and provide insurers with the technology solutions they need to empower employees to be there for their policyholders,” Jeremy Jawish, Shift’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “We have only just scratched the surface of what is possible when AI-based decision automation and optimization is applied to the critical processes that drive the insurance policy lifecycle.”
